Revolution, Counter-Revolution and Revisionism in Postcolonial Africa

This groundbreaking study investigates defining themes in the field of social memory studies as they bear on the politics of post-Cold-War, post-apartheid Southern Africa. Alice Dinerman offers a detailed chronicle of the Mozambican government's attempts to revise the country's troubled postcolonial past with a view to negotiating the political challenges posed by the present. In doing so, she lays bare the path-dependence of memory practices, while tracing their divergent trajectories, shifting meanings and varied combinations within ruling discourse and performance. Central themes include: - the interplay between past and present - the dialectic between remembering and forgetting - the dynamics between popular and official memory discourses - the politics of acknowledgement. Dinerman's original analysis is essential reading for students of modern Africa, the sociology of memory, Third World politics and post-conflict societies.

List of Maps Acknowledgments Glossary and Acronyms Notes on Terminology, Orthography and Currency Prologue: The Making and Unmaking of the Namapa Naparamas 1. Myth as a 'Meaning-making' Device in Post-Independence Mozambique 2. Aspects of Precolonial and Colonial Nampula 3. From 'Abaixo' to 'Chiefs of Production', 1975-1987 4. The Context, 1987-1994 5. Multipartyism, the Retraditionalization of Local Administration and the Apparent Duplication of State Authority: The Case of Nampula Province 6. Labor, Tribute and Authority 7. In the Name of the State 8. Roots, Routes and Rootlessness: Ruling Political Practice and Mozambican Studies Bibliography